It is also tempting to interpret them as
hacktivists. But when we interpret their digital acts through the Internet, they
embody all the characteristics of citizen subjects: they enact citizenship as
subjects of power with responsibility in ways that are instantly recognizable and
yet cannot be bounded by their identity as military or security personnel. If the
performative force of their code is louder than their words, the imaginary force
of their words is not so weak, either.

So the question of ‘who’ the subject is of digital rights is both an analytical
but also an urgent political question that requires addressing. If we use ‘citizen’
as the subject of these rights, clearly it does not capture how both the enactment
of the political subject and of cyberspace cut across national borders and legal
orders. Today, the citizen functions as a member of a nation-state, and there are
no corresponding rights and obligations beyond the nation-state that can govern
subjects whose acts traverse international spaces.
[...] What we gather from Rancière and Derrida is the importance of
refusing to make a choice between the citizen and the human as the subject of
digital rights. Instead, we anticipate a new figure of a citizen yet to come as the
subject of digital rights.

[...] But to do so also
demands vigilance in maintaining and re-equipping oneself in terms of both
skills and infrastructures in the face of constant change: ‘System outages,
constant software updates, platform redesigns, network upgrades, hardware
modifications, and connectivity changes make netizenship in the bitstream a
rather challenging way of life.

Annotators

Public presentations of their work. Students routinely have to describe and defend their thinking with peers, teachers, and the community. Students say that such public presentations reinforce their sense of accountability and make them be more careful with their work.

Moving annotation from a private practice with little accountability to something shared with the immediate social group of the classroom and finally to the larger public of the annotated web with students making interventions as digital citizens.

-> But the figure of cyberspace is also absent in citizenship
studies as scholars have yet to find a way to conceive of the figure of the citizen
beyond its modern configuration as a member of the nation-state. Consequently,
when the acts of subjects traverse so many borders and involve a multiplicity of
legal orders, identifying this political subject as a citizen becomes a fundamental
challenge. So far, describing this traversing political subject as a global citizen or
cosmopolitan citizen has proved difficult if not contentious.

[...] This absence is evinced by the fact that the
figure of the citizen is rarely, if ever, used to describe the acts of crypto-
anarchists, cyberactivists, cypherpunks, hackers, hacktivists, whistle-blowers,
and other political figures of cyberspace. It sounds almost outrageous if not
perverse to call the political heroes of cyberspace as citizen subjects since the
figure of the citizen seems to betray their originality, rebelliousness, and
vanguardism, if not their cosmopolitanism. Yet the irony here is that this is
exactly the figure of the citizen we inherit as a figure who makes rights claims. It
is that figure that has been betrayed and shorn of all its radicality in the
contemporary politics of the Internet. Instead, and more recently, the figure of
the citizen is being lost to the figure of the human as recent developments in
corporate and state data snooping and spying have exacerbated.

So it’s easy to say you don’t have to do everything in a MOOC to be part of it – some MOOCs offer different options to choose from, to help people find something they like. Some people will just think they’re supposed to do it all (poor them). More interestingly, though, is this: sometimes the “cool” people (and it’s really a perception more than anything) choose to all get together and do a particular “thing” and if you’re not into that particular “thing” you might feel excluded. They may have issued an open invitation, but you may have missed it, or didn’t realize you could join, or didn’t think you were talented enough, or didn’t know how to introduce yourself. Not everyone can do those things, you know… But it’s ok… as long as there are multiple opportunities, open invitations, eventually, someone will find something somewhere with some group. If they hang in there long enough.

Might this not be a kind of test of "digital citizenship": the ability to negotiate the barriers posed by such unintentional, perhaps even illusionary, cliques and groups in order to substantially participate in these open spaces?

This digital citizenship acknowledges that online experiences are as much a part of our common life as our schools, sidewalks, and rivers—requiring as much stewardship, vigilance, and improvement as anything else we share.

I really like the argument of this article. But I have some issues with the analogy between the online world and what are mostly public physical spaces.

Unlike, rives and sidewalks, online space has little to no regulation, whether from the government or NGOs.

Also, most of our public interactions online take place in private spaces, that is, places owned and operated by private corporations.